Helping to invest more and better: FAO Investment Centre celebrating 50 years of activity

This blog post, published on 11 January 2016, reviews the work of the FAO Investment Centre which recently celebrated 50 years of activity supporting FAO member countries in developing investment operations for agricultural development, food security and rural development. Over the last 50 years, the Centre has provided substantial support in the formulation of more than 2,000 investment projects and programmes in 170 countries, contributing about US$ 100 billion in investment to the rural sector.  Although the Investment Centre’s core strength remains that of project formulation, it recently diversified in two new areas of work. The first area is the assistance provided directly to countries to formulate national strategies, policies and plans for achieving sustainable development of their agricultural sector, while attaining food and nutrition security for their population. The second area is in the development of capacities in large project formulation and implementation at national level. As a result, countries’ stakeholders are empowered to better participate in the design of investment operations, together with the financiers. Although these new areas of work are very relevant, they require additional dedicated sources of funding which are not always easy to identify.